Meryl Streep

As if the result of some strange mass-media fluke, the popular radio program "A Prairie Home Companion" somehow managed to survive the television age to entertain its audience every Saturday night from the stage of the historic Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn. Week after week, hangdog host G.K. serves as unflappable emcee to an amiable hodgepodge of radio-friendly acts that include the likes of popular country duo Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson and...

Novelist Alice Hughes boards an ocean liner with her two best friends from college to have some fun and heal old wounds, while her nephew - who tags along to look after them - falls for an alluring stowaway.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf is starting to write her novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway, ' under the care of doctors and family. In 1951, Laura Brown is planning for her husband's birthday, but is preoccupied with reading Woolf's novel. In 2001, Clarrisa Vaughn is planning an award party for her friend, an author dying of AIDS. Taking place over one day, all three stories are interconnected with the novel: one is writing it, one is reading it, and one is living it....

Karen Silkwood becomes contaminated with plutonium at her job, voices her protest at the indifference and denial of her company, and becomes a threat to the entire nuclear industry and the government agencies that monitor it. Based on a true story.

Wedding date: Kat Ellis is determined to attend her younger sister's wedding with a date. Rather than face the ridicule of her family, and in order to show up her ex-fiance, she resorts to the Yellow Pages to find an escort. Prime: Rafi is a recently divorced 37-year-old Manhattan career woman. She meets Dave, a talented 23-year-old painter from Brooklyn, and the two fall in love. Told from everyone's point-of-view, including friends, relatives,...

Blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche, "New Yorker" journalist Susan Orlean, Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald. As Charlie struggles to adapt a best-selling book, he writes himself into the movie plot.

William Steig's Spinky Sulks is a 1988 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and Outstanding Book of the Year. Spinky is convinced that his family hates him and goes off to sulk in his hammock. His brother and sister try to make amends. His mom even brings him a beautiful tray of food. But nothing can get Spinky to stop sulking-not even a circus passing by on his street! Will Spinky ever cheer up? Spinky Sulks is another...

A little mouse thinks her name is absolutely perfect until she starts school and all the kids make fun of her.

Here is one of twelve magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates -- with unequaled grace and tenderness -- the deepest feelings we have. As Cheever writes in his preface, "These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and...